Looking for Ontologies to describe information about libraries

From: Jakob Voss <jakob.voss_at_nyob>
Date: Wed, 2 Dec 2009 11:58:45 +0100
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Hi!

For not to reinvent the wheel I am looking for any RDF ontologies that 
describe information about libraries. There are many formats and some 
ontologies (Dublin Core, FRBR, Bibliographic Ontology [Bibo]) for 
bibliographic data but no library-specific ontologies that I know of.

For instance how do you state that something is a library building that 
belongs to a given institution? How do you express opening times in RDF? 
How do you point to the URL of the OPAC? How do you say that a given 
collection is held by one library but owned by another person? I think 
we could reuse some parts of Bibo and from other general Ontologies like 
vCard, but I bet that there are concepts and relationships which only 
make sense for libraries - so they should be defined in RDFS/OWL!

I wonder why the Talis Directory does not include such library-specific 
information http://directory.talis.com/ui/ - they support vCard and 
their Address Schema in RDF [1] but not opening hours, ISIL identifier, 
library type, links to collections, URL of the OPAC and such (at least 
not in RDF).

By the way it would be a big step forward to have an URI representation 
of the "International Standard Identifier for Libraries and Related 
Organizations" (ISIL) to refer to libraries.

Oh, there is not even a defined class to state that something is a 
libray, isn't it? It should be a subclass of foaf:Organization or 
bibo:Collection, depending on what you mean.

Are there any projects to bring information about libraries into the 
Semantic Web?

Jakob

[1] http://www.talis.com/tdn/platform/reference/schemas/address

-- 
Jakob Voß <jakob.voss_at_gbv.de>, skype: nichtich
Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / Common Library Network
Platz der Goettinger Sieben 1, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
+49 (0)551 39-10242, http://www.gbv.de
Received on Wed Dec 02 2009 - 05:59:22 EST